Shameful lack of communication

I learned through a site on Facebook that Xcel was planning outages to prevent wildfires. I support their decision. And I knew that we were looking at a historically intense wind event. So I was not surprised that here in Littleton my power went out around 10:15 pm Saturday. Looking to the east of my house, it was completely dark, so I knew that it was a large outage. My neighbors across the street still had power (and continued to all weekend). I believe that this is because their houses back up to the light rail tracks along Santa Fe Drive, and so they're probably on a different circuit.

My husband, whose cell phone is the contact number for Xcel, was traveling to view the eclipse and he received a message at 8:11 am Sunday saying that there was no estimated time for restoration. As far as I know, that's the last time Xcel contacted us.

Throughout Sunday and Monday, I continued to use the quickly depleting power on my cell phone to try to determine when we'd have power restored. Imagine my surprise on waking Monday morning to find that Xcel was reporting no outage at my home! I assure you, it was still dark and cold and there was no power.

And at no time, on accessing Xcel's website, did I see an indication of they were doing to repair damage, or when we'd be able to get power back. Surely, Xcel has someone on staff that could put together a popup for the website explaining, for instance, that they had to visually inspect 600 miles of lines, and telling us how hard they were working to get us back to the 2020s from the 1890s.

I think my situation is not unusual - I don't get a physical newspaper, and without power, there's no internet and no TV. And I don't want to deplete my cell phone battery trying to search for information. Going to Xcel's website was, to me, a reasonable choice - that's where I could find information about when my power would be restored and what the process would be. But they failed miserably.

Because I don't get a physical newspaper, I use the Associated Press app to get news in quick headlines. I also am very frustrated with them - as far as I could tell, they NEVER reported that hundreds of thousands of people in the Denver area were without power for days, although this morning, they DID report on power losses in the Atlanta area that affected fewer people. But we didn't have the Masters tournament coming up, so I guess that's why.

In the end, I was without power for 40 hours. I'm lucky, though - my neighbor had a generator, and we were both able to run our refrigerators through the outage. My electric car also runs on gas so I was able to go out to eat. I have the financial flexibility to eat out and buy coffee at Starbucks so I could charge my phone. It wasn't a blizzard, so I was warm enough in my house. I don't rely on medical equipment that requires electricity. But many people don't have the privileges I do.

I understand that this was an unusual event. But better communication would have made it so much more bearable for many.